Stock market data systems

In 1884 the Dow Jones company published the first stock market averages, and in 1889 the first issue of the Wall Street Journal appeared.

Other inventors improved on this device, and ultimately Thomas Edison patented a "universal stock ticker", selling over 5,000 in the late 19th century.

[3] In the early 20th century Western Union acquired rights to an improved ticker which could deal with the increasing volume of stocks sold per day.

[3] At the time of the stock market crash in October, 1929, trading volumes were so high that the tickers fell behind, contributing to the panic.

[6] A quotation board is a large vertical electronic display located in a brokerage office, which automatically gives current data on stocks chosen by the local broker.

[8] Some firms had a battery of telephone operators seated in front of a Teleregister board to supply commission houses with price and volume data.

[9] In 1955 Scantlin Electronics, Inc. introduced a competitive display system very similar in appearance but with digits twice the size of Teleregister's, fitting into the same board area.

There, such requests would be forwarded to the floor of the appropriate exchange, where messengers could copy down prices at the locations where those stocks were traded, and telephone answers back to the wire room.

As these items were updated a data packet would be generated for transmission by AT&T Dataphone at 1000 bits/second to identical magnetic drum storage devices in each major city in the United States.

The desk units would set up the ticker symbol code for the desired stock by mechanical means actuating micro switches.

By the fall of 1961 Ultronics had installed its first desk units (Stockmaster) in New York and Philadelphia, followed by San Francisco and Los Angeles.

In June 1964 Ultronics and the British news company Reuters signed a joint venture agreement to market Stockmaster worldwide outside of North America.

[11][12] In the early 1960s when these first desk top quotation units were developed the only real time information available from the various stock and commodity exchanges were the last sale and the bid and ask ticker lines.

This time difference made having the bid-ask on their desk top unit extremely important to a stockbroker even though there was an extra charge to the exchange for this information.

Major cities hosted Central Office equipment connected to newly designed Quotron II desk units in brokerage offices on which a broker could request, for any stock, price and net change from the opening, or a summary which included highs, lows, and volumes (later SEI added other features like dividends and earnings).

[10] At the end of each day, this same system transmitted stock market pages to United Press International, which in turn sold them to its newspaper customers all over the world.

The pricing at that time made the units quite profitable and allowed the companies to finance the cost and use rapid accounting depreciation of the equipment.

In July 1962 AT&T launched the first commercial satellite (Telstar) to transmit television and telephone voice channels between the U.S. and England and France.

This was a non-synchronous satellite which circled the earth in an elliptical orbit of about 2.5 hours, such that it gave only about 20 minutes of communication between the U.S. and Europe on each pass.

All of the arrangements were made-a Stockmaster unit was installed in the Bache brokerage office on Rue Royale and all of the American Stockbrokers and the press and television were ready for this historic event.